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Granted, my first off-the-cuff reaction was white and gold, partially because I was expecting white/gold or blue/black due to the choices presented. Expectation has a lot to do with what we perceive. However, when I looked closer for a minute or two my color perception shifted to blue/burnt orange and that's all I see now.

Another Apple lawyer, Eric Albritton of the Albritton Law Firm in Longview, told the jury there was no reason for Apple to pay royalties on the price of a phone when the dispute is over a single feature.

“It doesn’t make a lick of sense that one person would buy an iPhone and not make calls,” he told the jury. “People do not buy cell phones for the sole purpose of using apps.”

In related news, iPod Touch sales are apparently nonexistent.

IPod Touch sales would have gone up when Apple dropped the iPod classic (160GB) if there was a 128GB or 256GB version and if it was priced reasonably. Instead, Apple left iPod classic users high and dry....

The 5th Gen is about 3 years old and the 6th Gen is expected by March or April of this year and supposedly will include a 128GB model.

Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit over and beyond the simple fact that so many of the world's classics are available free of charge wherever you have internet access is a bonus that can't be overlooked. Honestly, in terms of studying books such as Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire, I find myself eternally grateful for such capabilities.

I agree wholeheartedly that the eBook experience *could* be much better than physical books, but it isn't.

As an experiment, I recently picked up a reader and tried it (Sony eReader). Here's what I found:

Um... well... well, There’s Your Problem....

I've had a Kindle for 5 years now. My first was the Kindle keyboard. I now have the new Kindle Voyage. Not only that, but I can actually speak to the topic of using a Kindle for University as I bought text books for one of my Masters Degree classes, as an experiment.

- The Kindle e-reader has no glare. In fact, the e-Ink screen is SO good that you can read outside in bright sunshine with no problems whatsoever. I love being able to read on the beach.- The Kindle is instant on when in sleep mode and can last for weeks. Just make sure to turn Wifi off.- You can look up words- I'm not sure how well it handles PDF files as I never use it for that. That's what I have my Android tablet for.- You have all kinds of text formatting options with the Kindle- You can easily bookmark locations in the Kindle and got back to that exact spot.

The Kindle is great for reading books. It lets you annotate, you can perform search, etc.

That being said, it isn't a book. With a book you can highlight, dog ear, make notes in the margins, etc. When I used a Kindle for my Masters course, I found that it was very good in some respects. For example, you don't have to carry a heavy book with you, it's more convenient to read when in the office, you can search for terms and look them up, etc. However, note taking was too restrictive. You can't, for example, draw a diagram or draw on the existing diagram. It's easier to find a place/topic in a book by just flipping through it or dogearing a page. You can use different colored highlighters, etc.

One of these days Amazon will come out with a touch screen color e-ink e-reader with a stylus that lets you create free-form notes. When you can actually take hand written notes in class and insert those notes as pages in between the actual pages of the e-textbook, that's when you will see e-readers take off as text book replacements.

I have better odds finding a winning lotto ticket on the ground than if I buy one.

No, I don't think so. Any odds of finding a winning lottery ticket on the ground would be drastically worse because first you have to calculate the odds of finding that ticket in the first place. Given that the winning ticket would have to have been purchased locally (tickets are sold across the US and bought by Canadians on the border) or carried into your area somehow, it would have to end up in an area where you could find it, and you would have to find it at the precise time that it was in the same spot as you.

My thought is that your odds approach zero at this point. In other words, your odds of finding a winning lottery ticket on the ground are much closer to not buying a lottery ticket than if you actually bought a ticket and it being the winning one.

I'm thinking that the question should be more geared towards time watching media content given that there are now multiple methods of consumption. For example. many people who do not watch "TV" still end up using streaming services to watch "TV programs". Sure, they are time shifted and also can be device shifted (computer, tablet, cell phone, etc), but they are still video media content.

How exactly is it any different if someone spends time watching, for example, the complete series of The Wire on a tablet vs someone else watching their favorite programs on TV?

My personal preference is Movies over TV programs. I also rarely watch TV during the summer. During the fall I will watch NFL football and in the second half of the winter I watch hockey on NHL Gamecenter Live (streaming). There are very few series that I like but I DVR the ones that I do and skip over the commercials. Most TV shows are down to about 40 minutes each.

One of these days the NFL will get off of their asses and offer a live streaming service similar to the NHL, for regular season games. That's when I will probably go all digital.

... to help determine if a drop in temperature — a slowing of the air molecules inside the football — can explain the low pressure....

The National Felons League (an organization of Billionaire Team Owners that is considered non-profit so that it pays no taxes) is just looking for an excuse here. The patriots were laughed at when they tried to pull the temperature excuse out of their ass, so they want a University to back up the "pressure goes down with temperature" excuse. They need to do this because even die hard Patriot fans are not buying the "a locker room attendant did this all on his own" story. And lets completely ignore why this supposed temperature drop affected only one teams footballs and not those provided by the other team, or why the problem was only observed when the opposition intercepted a ball and not by any of the Patriot players as they handled the balls.

It turns out that it's not just a locker room attendant but... an elderly locker room attendant..... Those old guys, they are always up to something nefarious....http://www.nfl.com/news/story/...

i solved this issue on day one. they injected hot gas into the football right before the pressure was measured. pressure was fine with the hot gas, but once the gas reached ambient temperature the pressure was lower. Using the ideal gas law I calculated the gas would need to be 30 C (about 55 F) hotter than ambient. Completely feasible.

science, bitches!

I'm willing to bet that you used 2 PSI in your calculations as that is what was initially leaked as the pressure difference for all of the footballs. There have been further leaks saying that only the intercepted ball, the one in possession of the Colts, was 2 PSI low. The rest were supposedly under 1 PSI low.http://www.businessinsider.com...

Based on the information from Billichick, it's likely that at least one of the footballs, if not more, were roughed up (which is what they do the prepare the footballs) just before the testing. This also could account for the internal temperature of the air being higher than ambient.

For those asking the question about whether the league should understand what happens to footballs, the answer is that Yes they should. But No, they have never seen the need to delve this deeply into it before. The Refs don't even put the football pressure readings on paper when they test them, assuming that they are actually doing their job and using gauges. You would think that in this day and age that they would test each football, record the readings, and stamp it with a random bar-code.

They could probably use a temperature gun to measure the ball temperature prior to taking the pressure reading. Or, for that matter, the pressure gauge should have a temperature gauge built in. Enter this information into an app along with game time weather and they could use it to set the football pressure for game conditions.

There... an new App for the Microsoft Surface... Football Pressure Calibrator for Weather Conditions (FPCWC)....

PS: I would have typed that this would be a new app for the iPad, but the NFL has a marketing deal with Microsoft.

It's been shown over and over that a similarly configured PC costs as much or more than a comparable Mac. It's just that you can't buy a stripped-down Mac, like you can with PCs.

I agree that the Mac vs PC argument today from a cost perspective is silly. There are still reasons for getting a PC, such as gaming and doing finances. However, hardware and cost for the same specs is pretty much a wash.

Perhaps your problem is the definition of nothing, but to me that part is accurate since Apple did not sell any kind of phone or touchscreen device up until that point... and it really was a dramatically different device than any smartphone sold at the time.

From the standpoint of what Apple had done until then, it was from nothing. Resource wise, they had some money coming in from the iPod at that point, but they were tiny compared to all other companies making smartphones at the time. Lots of people dismissed the chances of Apple's making any kind of dent in the market based on that alone...

You are quite wrong about the resources that Apple had at their disposal. It's true that they didn't have a huge amount of revenue coming in, but you are forgetting the infusion of $150 million that Microsoft put into Apple. It also looks like there was a settlement that they had with Microsoft and Intel that was up to $500 million. Supposedly Microsoft and Intel had used some of the video compression routines from Quicktime in their own products. According to recent articles, it was settled quietly which is why very few know about it.

I save my hatred for the circle-jerking culture club that grew up around it. Mostly because rampant idiocy and fanaticism annoy the fuck out of me.

I see. Can you give your thoughts on the similar crowd regarding Windows products?

The majority of Microsoft products are focused on the business markets which tends not to breed fan bois. I'm not even sure if there is another tech that engenders the fanaticism that we see for Apple products. Sure, we have Xbox vs PS4, Canon vs Nikon, Windows vs Linux, etc. However, most of the discussions around these products tend to be technical in nature.

Apple fans tend to stick with the message that Apple is better than everything else, no matter what. A brief example of this is when Samsung released a larger screen phone. Apple fans decried that it was better than the current iPhone because it was too big, ate up too much battery power, etc. Then when Apple released a large screen phone, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Just to be clear, by Apple "fans" here, I mean true fanatics... The vast majority of Apple users are just everyday regular people who only care whether their battery is charged or not.

They did it by striking when the iron was hot, as soon as there were well-performing touchscreens. Imagine there had been no Apple, or Apple had not seen the market. Do you really think the world would have missed the opportunity to make a similar phone? It might have been delayed one or two years at most.

But Apple's beating the competition in the market shows mainly one thing: they were working behind the scenes to realize a no-keys touchscreen smartphone before the parts were available. That shows real initiative.

So, they took the PC tablet concepts that were already in the market, despite them being clunky and having poor battery life, and imagined them as phones... I agree that it required innovation on Apple's part, but the concepts were already there. To Apple's credit, they were willing to take risks on cutting edge technology and took their design experience with the iMac and extended it to phones.

Sweden is #190 on that list. We have cheap and excellent broadband options. Not a valid excuse.

Um, Sweden is only 170K square miles. The US is 3.8M square miles. So, while Sweden's population density is less than the US, the coverage area, and thus cost, is MUCH higher. Granted, a good portion of the US would not need full coverage as there is nothing in some places but wilderness and loggers... (grin)

Playing Angry Birds is much nicer on a larger screen, and DSLR remote shooting is also much easier with a large screen. With tablets being cheaper than smart phones, it is often a no brainer to just have one also.

I agree. Traveling with a tablet, unless you need to do work, is so much easier than taking a laptop. Granted, you can get ultra portable laptops and Microsoft Surface that would be close to the same form factor and weight, but they cost much more. I love that I can watch a 3 hour movie on a plane and still have battery life left over to play games, etc.